Babylist was founded in 2011 as an online baby registry allowing expecting parents to add items from any store or website to their registry. The flexibility and intuitive nature of the brand’s online shopping experience helped it grow quickly, and in 2022, Babylist served over nine million new parents and gift-givers.
Babylist recently unveiled its first permanent brick-and-mortar location, an 18,000 square foot flagship retail store in Beverly Hills, California. The team evaluated several POS systems before opening the store, and it chose Shopify POS as the best solution to meet its needs.
With Shopify POS providing reliable payment processing at its flagship store, Babylist has enjoyed:
- A unified multi-channel commerce stack
- Streamlined sales, financial, and inventory management
- Quick and easy payment processing for customers
- Improved customer satisfaction due to integrated in-store and online experience
Challenge
Babylist has used Shopify to power its online store since 2018. In recent years, the brand began transitioning to an omnichannel selling strategy. After seeing success with several pop up stores, the brand had proof-of-concept for the viability of physical stores, and it began the process of planning for its first permanent retail location.
Before opening the store, the team recognized that selecting the right POS system was essential for ensuring a successful launch. It determined a list of criteria necessary to validate a POS system that would meet its needs. These criteria included:
- Essential retail capabilities available out of the box (i.e., minimum customization)
- Seamless integration with existing commerce systems
- Support for multi-channel shopping experiences (e.g., buy in-store, ship to home)
- Support for gift returns
For our flagship store, we wanted a reliable POS system that would provide our essential retail functionality out of the box and wouldn’t create a lot of unnecessary risk. We also needed to have a holistic view of our customers, whether they were buying online or in-store
Solution
The ability of Shopify POS to sync customer, order, and inventory details across retail and online sales channels ensured a seamless integration with its online store, which was already powered by Shopify. Having so much of this important information about its products and customers already on Shopify helped Babylist get up and running quickly. Integrating with the third-party inventory management app, Stocky, also helped ensure its speed to launch.
“Since we were already using Shopify for our online store, setting up Shopify POS for our first retail location was straightforward,” says Mitou. “We were able to use our existing product catalog to set up our retail assortment quickly, and Stocky's direct integration with Shopify gave us the inventory management tools our retail staff needed to properly track our retail inventory without needing additional development resources.”
And since Shopify POS is managed from the same admin as its online store, Babylist could centralize its orders and reporting while streamlining its back office operations at the same time, with no need to reconcile data between systems. This helped unlock even greater time savings.
On the sales floor, the team was equipped with both POS Go, Shopify POS’ fully integrated hardware, and the POS app on an iPad, enabling full mobility throughout the store so staff can provide better customer service and complete transactions anywhere in the store.
The portability of the POS Go really works for our location and allows for seamless processing of payment for our guests. From a management standpoint, I appreciate being able to easily limit specific functionality dependent on the position and have it not impact the employee experience in ringing up guests.
Results
With Shopify POS, Babylist was able to launch its flagship store on schedule and provide a seamless shopping experience to its customers. The team was able to meet its goal of unifying Babylist’s sales channels as well, positioning itself strongly for future scale. The retail staff has also reported that Shopify POS has had a positive impact on the in-store customer experience.
“Shopify POS is a very simple system and being so mobile and quickly taking payment is what guests are looking for,” says Si-Si. “Additionally, being able to start guests' profiles and look up previous transactions is key in creating a seamless experience in the event of a guest returning or a gift receiver stopping in with an exchange or return. Today’s shoppers expect that type of functionality so it’s important to have.”
The team was also pleased with the simplicity of the system and how easy it was to train new employees.
“Training on Shopify POS is extremely intuitive and getting the team up and running using the POS system is a minimal lift. Navigating the app is extremely clear and concise and functionally it makes a lot of sense for the store team,” says Si-Si.
Overall, Shopify POS has helped set Babylist up for future success. With its flagship store successfully launched, the team plans to focus on continuing to provide the best shopping experience for new parents online and in-store, with plans to grow its retail presence nationwide.
Investing in Shopify POS was the right choice for Babylist. It enabled us to unlock the core retail features we needed in a matter of weeks. And our ability to leverage a unified view of inventory also sets us up to better integrate our in-store and online customer experiences in the future.
